H0LiCOW – IX. Cosmographic analysis of the doubly imaged quasar SDSS 1206+4332 and a new measurement of the Hubble constant

By Simon Birrer, T. Treu, C. Rusu, Vivien Bonvin, C. Fassnacht, J. Chan, A. Agnello, Anowar J. Shajib, G. Chen, M. Auger and 8 more. Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2018

305 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present a blind time-delay strong lensing (TDSL) cosmographic analysis of the doubly imaged quasar SDSS 1206+4332 . We combine the relative time delay between the quasar images, Hubble Space Telescope imaging, the Keck stellar velocity dispersion of the lensing galaxy, and wide-field photometric and spectroscopic data of the field to constrain two angular diameter distance relations. The combined analysis is performed by forward modelling the individual data sets through a Bayesian hierarchical framework, and it is kept blind until the very end to prevent experimenter bias. After unblinding, the inferred distances imply a Hubble constant H_0 = 68.8|$^{+5.4}_{-5.1}$| km s^−1 Mpc^−1, assuming a flat Λ cold dark matter cosmology with uniform prior on Ω_m in [0.05, 0.5]. The precision of our cosmographic measurement with the doubly imaged quasar SDSS 1206+4332 is comparable with those of quadruply imaged quasars and opens the path to perform on selected doubles the same analysis as anticipated for quads. Our analysis is based on a completely independent lensing code than our previous three H0LiCOW systems and the new measurement is fully consistent with those. We provide the analysis scripts paired with the publicly available software to facilitate independent analysis (footnote with link to www.h0licow.org). The consistency between blind measurements with independent codes provides an important sanity check on lens modelling systematics. By combining the likelihoods of the four systems under the same prior, we obtain H_0 = 72.5|$^{+2.1}_{-2.3}$| km s^−1 Mpc^−1. This measurement is independent of the distance ladder and other cosmological probes.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6747b5456f532d7f9fa8b71227d9f7a7ed439244

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Citations in the corpus

Alleviating the H0 and σ8 anomalies with a decaying dark matter model (2019, methodology): “3 km/s/Mpc [9] from the H0LiCOW collaboration based on lensing time delays is in moderate tension with Planck, while a constraint from Big Bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) combined with baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) data of H0 = 66.”
The Local Perspective on the Hubble Tension: Local Structure Does Not Impact Measurement of the Hubble Constant (2019, background): “Results from the H0LiCOW collaboration based on time delay distance measurements of lensed quasars at z 1 give H 72.5 km s Mpc0 2.32.1 1 1= -+ - - (Birrer et al. 2019).”
Sounds Discordant: Classical Distance Ladder and ΛCDM-based Determinations of the Cosmological Sound Horizon (2018, methodology): “However, this effect is likely to be small given the weak dependence on the Ωm prior reported by Birrer et al. (2019).”
Rock ‘n’ roll solutions to the Hubble tension (2019, background): “The discrepancy of the present day Hubble parameter H0 derived from local measurements [1–5] and from cosmic microwave background (CMB) measurements [6–8] is perhaps the most notable indication of a problem.”
The Mass Relations between Supermassive Black Holes and Their Host Galaxies at 1 < z < 2 with HST-WFC3 (2019, methodology): “While modeling multiply imaged AGNs, this mismatch can be mitigated with PSF reconstruction by the iterative method(Chen et al. 2016; Birrer et al. 2019).”
H0LiCOW – XIII. A 2.4 per cent measurement of H0 from lensed quasars: 5.3σ tension between early- and late-Universe probes (2019, methodology): “Our most recent measurements had constrained H0 to 3.0 per cent precision for a flat CDM cosmology from a combination of four lensed quasars (Birrer et al. 2019, hereafter H0LiCOW IX).”
Completed SDSS-IV extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: Cosmological implications from two decades of spectroscopic surveys at the Apache Point Observatory (2020, unknown): “One example of this indirect measurement is that obtained using time delays in strongly-lensed quasars (e.g., Birrer et al. 2019).”
TDCOSMO IV: Hierarchical time-delay cosmography -- joint inference of the Hubble constant and galaxy density profiles (2020, methodology): “The line-of-sight analysis is presented by Birrer et al. (2019).”